Steve Maniscalco Photography

What Film?

So now I've got 27 cameras...all wanting a roll of film. Question is, which film?

As a rule, I've generally fed point and shoot cameras iso 400 film. My reasoning is that questionable AF systems are best helped by maxing depth of field. Also, since most point and shoots will sport a wide'ish and slow'ish lens, it's not like I'm going to do any fancy narrow DOF work anyway. Another consideration...higher speed film helps keep that flash turned off. I don't much care for flash and some of these cameras are so auto-everything that you can't even manually turn it off (yuk).

Ok, 400 iso it is...now, color or black and white.  My first preference is always black and white, but there are certainly some downsides. Shooting black and white means processing it myself, ok, that's actually good and bad. Good is, it's cheap. Bad is, that's a lot of film and time! How about cost? Well, it's pretty close really. Drug store 400 iso color can be had for $2/roll plus $1 for developing. I can get tri-x for about $3/roll, so that's really a wash. Hmmm... I think I'll go with the drug store color. Why? Well, I'm likely to hand a bunch of these cameras to some boy scouts to shoot with.  I don't much relish the idea of developing all that film when most of it will be random crap. Heck, I might even splurge on an additional $1/roll to let the drug store make crappy scans and save myself that time (not inconsiderable).

400 iso, color, drug store film. Sounds like a plan.

I may make a couple of exceptions for the better cameras I want to shoot myself. I've got this slightly perverse desire to shoot 50 iso through an Olympus XA2. I wonder if I'll get any keepers zone focusing narrow dof?

And Then There Were 27

Finished the initial culling of the 35. We are now down to 27. I tested all I could, but did not have batteries for a few of the others, so I may find others that don't make the initial cut.

	Make	Model	Failure
5	HP	C200	Digital
22	Kodak	Disc 4100	Generally unavailable film
25	Nikon	Nice Touch 2	Loads film and never stops loading
26	Ricoh	FF-90	Brick
27	Olympus	Infinity Stylus zoom DLX	Brick
28	Minolta	Action Zoom	Brick
29	??	??	Mystery Digital Toy
33	Ansco	235	Brick

 

I'm seriously disappointed only about the Ricoh FF-90. It's a solid little camera with lots of manual options and a good reputation. I may hold on to it to tinker with later. The only other disappointment would be the Infinity Zoom. I had that one figured to be a contender for the one Zoom I might like to keep and use.

35 Cameras

Ever tempted to buy a box of cameras? I have been many times. I've even bought 4 or 5 cameras at a time if the price was right and there was at least 1 good camera in the lot. What I've never done before is buy anything like 35 cameras in a single lot. Of course, that's what I've done now.

With my love of cheap toys, the ebay listing was just too hard to resist. I got the lot at $35 + $23 for shipping. That's $1.68 per camera. How could I go wrong? Looked to me as though there might be a couple of winners in there, and even if not, I was pretty sure I could find a way to have fun with a box o' cameras.

Now that I have them in hand, the obvious question is, "What will I do with them all?" I've got an idea or two. At this point, it seems most likely I'll put about 20 of them in the hands of some Boy Scouts who've never shot film cameras before. We'll see what they can come up with. Should be a learning experience for us all.

Here is the inventory list and photo as they were listed on ebay.

	Make	Model	Lens
1	Fuji	DL-400 Tele QD	35mm f3.5/70mm f6.7
2	Vivitar	BV35	35mm f??
3	Vivitar	C35R	35mm f??
4	Yashica	Zoom Image 70	35mm f3.5 - 70mm f6.7
5	HP	C200	6mm f2.8
6	Olympus	Infinity Super Zoom 3000	38-110 mm
7	Minolta	Freedom Zoom 115	37.5mm - 115mm
8	Minolta	Freedom 140EX	38-140mm macro
9	Ricoh	Q-80Z	38-80mm macro
10	Olympus	XA2 (1)	35mm f3.5
11	Ricoh	TF-500	35mm f2.8/70mm f5.6
12	Olympus	XA2 (2)	35mm f3.5
13	Minolta	Explorer Freedom Zoom	28-70mm
14	Samsung	Maxima Zoom 130 glm	28-130mm
15	Pentax	PC35AF	35mm f2.8/70mm f5.6
16	Pentax	IQ Zoom 70 date	35-70mm macro
17	Kodak	KB10	35mm
18	Halina/Ansco	Silhouette Zoom	28-52mm
19	Minolta	Freedom Zoom 150	37.5-150mm
20	Canon	Sure Shot Z70W	28-70mm f5.6-f7.8
21	Canon	Sure Shot 155Micro	38-115mm
22	Kodak	Disc 4100	??
23	Nikon	One Touch	35mm f2.8/70mm f5.6
24	Pentax	iq zoom ezy-r	38-70mm
25	Nikon	Nice Touch 2	35mm macro
26	Ricoh	FF-90	35mm f2.8
27	Olympus	Infinity Stylus zoom DLX	35-70mm macro
28	Minolta	Action Zoom	38-80mm macro
29	??	??	??
30	Fuji	Nexia 20 Auto	??
31	Ricoh	AF-77
32	Nikon	Fun Touch 2	34mm f4.5
33	Ansco	235	33mm
34	Fuji	Discovery 2000 Zoom	40-105mm
35	Olympus	Trip 500	28mm

First thing I'll do is a basic function test so I can weed out the ones that won't be worth a roll of film. I'll let you know how that goes in my first update.

Stay tuned.

First Friday

I will be showing some of my older work at a Phoenix gallery for January's First Friday art walk (This Friday, the 7th). The work consists of 8 images from my "Square and Narrow" series I did a few years ago. I was shooting digital at the time and that medium was well suited to the hit and miss nature of very narrow depth of field work.

For those of you familiar with my love of all things camera and old, you'll be happy to know that at least these digital images were taken with various old manual focus lenses adapted to work with my Canon 300D. Of course, by now the 300D must be seen by most as a relative antique of digital cameras...though it remains my only DSLR.

I have to admit to being just a bit conflicted over showing these images. I did them as sort of a technical challenge to myself. Could I do something different with an old subject? Could I manage the miniscule DOF? I never really thought of these images as particularly "artistic." "Decorative" would be a better description. In any case, they fit the needs of the show and I am proud of them...I just look forward to finding a venue for work nearer to my heart.

Details of the show follow these examples of the images.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.pdf of event flyer

   

Lately

Sooooooo, I dropped the Instant 365 project over a month ago. Was it the right thing to do? What have I been doing since?

Yes, it was the right thing to do. A year is a pretty arbitrary time to pick and the fact is, I'd gone as far as I could with that project. It was causing more stress than creativity, so it had to go. One of the reasons I wanted to drop it was to free time to go back and do more alternative printing.  On the up side of that effort, I've got my chemicals, done my test prints, developed my printing curve for digital negatives and Vandyke prints, and I'm all ready to go. On the down side, with my schedule it will be another couple of weekends before I can actually do any printing. 

I did get to try a bit of lumen printing using digital negatives. I have to say, I'm not so impressed with the results that I'm likely to go at that again.  Seems to me that Lumen printing may be best suited to pictograms and less suited to digital negatives. My best effort is shown below...and to be honest, the scan looks better than the actual print.

What else...oh, I bought a manual flash, light stand, umbrella and wireless trigger. Yep, I'm going to try my hand at strobist work. I've always disdained flash because I've seldom seen it done "right." My definition of right amounts to unobtrusive and subtle.  Just as I hate images that scream HDR, I hate those that scream unnatural light. With that in mind, I may never get results that make me happy, but, since this is a seriously neglected area in my photo skill set, I thought it worth a try.

I have managed a few shots in the last weeks. Dusted off the Yashicamat 124G and, as always, enjoyed shooting with it.

I haven't neglected my polaroids....

...did a little low light shooting with the Hexar AF...

...and walked around with the Mamiya 7.

 

Life is good.

The End

Well, the end of my Instant 365 project anyway. That's not really a bad thing. 

A project like this is sort of an artificial stimulant. It exists to force you to think every day and try to create something every day. Perhaps "creative training wheels" would be the right analogy? I don't know. In any case, I've got enough on my mind and enough photography plans to drop those training wheels off and go in another direction now.

I'm not going to stop taking polaroids, but I am going to stop trying to wring one out of myself every day. I'm putting together a single light strobist set up for portraits, and I'm going to make a real effort to get some people in front of my cameras. Also, I'm ramping up to make more cyanotypes...one of my most rewarding and popular efforts in the past.

365 Fatigue

Eight months down, four to go...feeling that burn out thing in a big way. Partially it's the difficulty I'm having getting out to take the shot, partially it's that I think I've gotten all I'm going to get out of this project and I'm anxious to move on.

Well...not giving it up today in any case.

Artistic TZ diptych. The shot on the left was taken using a 1.5x teleconverter on the sx-70. I was happy to see that the diptych worked in spite of the perspective shift brought on by that teleconverter.

 

This is not a negative! I continue to be vexed by impossible project film. This time it's the pz-600 for spectra. I like the effect, but it's so extreme that most images are completely lost. 

I'm a Coward...

...and it's what limits me as a photographer.

I'm not afraid of walking miles in a blistering desert. I'm not afraid of scrambling up and down the sides of rocks or dangling off the edge of cliffs. And, I'm not afraid of walking around depressed urban areas at all hours of the day or night. Hell, I'm not afraid to "walk through the valley of the shadow of death"...but putting people in front of my camera scares the crap out of me.

Creatively, I think people are my final frontier. 

Instead of urban landscapes, I need to do some street shooting. I need to be fearless and just put that damn camera to my eye, even though people will notice that I'm taking their picture. They may not like my taking their picture, but they're going to have to get over it.

I need to set up a couple of lights and get people to stand in front of them. I'll have to actually make contact with people with the intent of taking their picture. I may not be able to meet their expectations either in the experience or the results, but I'm just going to have to get over that.

I can't keep hiding out in open spaces and between abandoned buildings. Unless I get more than just secondary signs of humanity in my work, I'm very much afraid it will come to an end...and I need it too much to allow that.

Icons Don't Have Background Noise

Checked the iPad yesterday before going in to the gym. Did the foursquare thing,then checked twitter. One of my favorite twitterites, Jessica Hibbard, mentioned a contest at The Impossible Project. Send them your best PX-70 shot and maybe win the right to test the next generation of PX film. Love it, want it...

So, with the contest deadline just a few hours away I was glad I'd brought my cameras with me. After the gym, I intended to go out and look for something to shoot. Something of a Hail Mary pass thing considering I had nothing in mind and no idea where to look. Well, as often seems to happen in my semi-charmed life, a very cool subject had been parked 3 slots down from me whilst I sweated to the oldies. 

This was my first shot of it. I liked the results, but thought it could be improved on. I figured taking the shot at more of an angle and showing off some of the side and seat would be more compelling. 

 

This is what I came up with on the second shot. Pretty much exactly what I had in mind...and not as good (to my eye) as the first shot. Ends up that this composition forced me to include part of a bumper from a nearby truck on the right, and an entire car in the upper left corner. I find those elements distracting. They take away from an image that is trying to be iconic. Icons don't have background noise.

 

So, I've uploaded that first image to The Impossible Project. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
 
 

Instant 365 Project...limping along

August...the toughest month of any picture a day project...I hope. I admit that I'm running out of things to point the camera at on a regular basis. Of course, that's sort of the point of a PAD, to force me to keep looking at different things and the same old things in a different way. 

Descansos - On PX100. I think I need to swear off the temperature sensitive film till it cools off in AZ. I'm getting about 1 image out of a pack of 8. Too hot, too cool...just can't get it right.

Kiva Lodge, Refrigerated - On Spectra film. Still looking around for those old motel signs.

 

A Place in the Yard - Edge cut 600 film on the Indian reservation not far from work. Lots of burned out and tagged things to shoot out there.

 
 

 

Get Closer

Out in a desperate area just outside of town yesterday, finding broken things to shoot. There are a number of these old farm houses that have been burned out after being taken over by gangs and the indigent. Always I find evidence of someone sleeping in the poor shelter...and always there is drug paraphernalia and empty liquor bottles. It's no wonder the places are burned out. I do wonder if the fires are started accidentally by the new "inhabitants," or if the locals don't torch the places to keep the cleaned out. In any case, in this sort of destruction and decay, there are photo opportunities, so in a perverse way, at least I'm glad they're there.

The brilliant colors of the tagging contrasting with the burned out building attracted my attention here. I took this first shot from what is almost a habitual perspective for me for this type of work...straight on...just show what it is like to stand in front of the subject, put the viewer in your shoes.

 

I like it. It's a pretty effective shot, particularly with the shadows of the burned out ceiling joists cutting across. I almost let it go at that, after all, not much 125i silk left in my fridge, and I had a good image. On the other hand, wouldn't I be wasting film if I walked away without an image I really liked? So, I moved closer and took the second shot.

 
In this closer shot, the green letters are somewhat obscured, becoming more graphical than directly communicative. The burned out joists are more apparent and the sky becomes a more effective contrast to the derelict building.

It's that whole Robert Capa thing again, "If your picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough." Of course, there are no land mines out here...I hope.

What I Should Have Brought on My Vacation

Just going through a little mental post-mortem on my recent 3 weeks in an RV and I’ve come to what may be a surprising conclusion…I’d have been better off bringing a DSLR.

Yep, that’s what I said. I should have left the Bronica SQ kit at home and brought a DSLR with a couple of (gulp) zooms.

If you’ve been to this blog more than once, you probably know that I’m almost all film and lately a whole lot of Polaroid. Given that, why should I recommend a DSLR?  Well, I don’t know about your family vacations, but mine make really terrible photo excursions, for the simple reason that photography is low on the priority list behind keeping the wife, kids, dogs and RV all happy as we rumble across three thousand miles of roads in the Western US.

Without the time try to accomplish an artistic approach to a subject, there really is no point in brining along what I consider to be “the big guns.” I know a DSLR will meet that definition for many folks, but I’d rather work in film for anything creative.

So, what I should have brought was my polaroids, a brownie and a DSLR.  I  could have kept up with my Instant 365, taken advantage of the occasional crappy camera shot and gone snap happy with the DSLR.

Maybe next time.

Too Far Gone to Ever Catch Up!

With nearly a month's worth of Instant 365 images not posted here, I'm going to just declare myself too far behind to catch up. I'll use this post to show a few of my favorite vacation polaroids then just pretend I'm up to date. I can do that. I'm in charge. Besides, I can't be disappointing all that many people. :-)

Monument Valley - I had to convince my wife not to take a route that would have bypassed Monument Valley. Even so, I only had time to pull over for 1 snap.

 

Arches National Park - Yes, the arches are cool, but there's so much interesting stuff to shoot that I chose not to highlight them. Love what the Artistic TZ does for this shot.

 

Bison - Yep, I got pretty close to that one. I have to say, it would have taken a great deal more courage if I had not been safely in a 30 ft RV at the time!

 

Ute Trail Motel - Loved this sign! One of the best old motel signs I saw on the trip, and I saw a great many of them...most of which I passed at highway speeds with no chance to shoot.

 

San Francisco de Asis,Taos, NM - One of the few things along the way that I knew I'd want to shoot before getting there. Again, Artistic TZ has turned my poor effort in to something special.

 
 
 
 
 

A Long Trip and a Few Thoughts

Just back from the vacation and I have a few things to share.

• As always, I over packed. I did not get time to shoot my pinhole camera or the 35mm camera loaded with 8mm Kodachrome. Not a big deal, just 2 bags I didn’t touch.
• Instead of a tripod, I wish I’d brought a monopod.  Even the lowest light things I shot could have been done at 1/30^th of a second and a monopod would have been sufficient for stabilizing the Bronica at those speeds. Also, because of the size and weight of the tripod, I did not carry it when I should have.
• In some ways I question my decision to carry the Bronica vs the lighter, handier Mamiya 7 kit. I basically shot only 1 film, which eliminated most of the advantage of interchangeable backs…but, I did make use of polarizing filters, which are easier on an SLR like the Bronica than on a rangefinder camera.
• I didn’t shoot even 1 roll of BW film! Wow...very strange for me.
• P&S cameras are great…but I hate not having a viewfinder!  Took all the pleasure from shooting…made me fell like an observer rather than a photographer.
• Just because I can process C41, doesn't mean I wan to...at least not 10 rolls. I dropped the film off and will pick it up this afternoon.
• Lastly…when it’s not a photo vacation, and with my family, it’s NEVER a photo vacation, you just have to let go and relax or you’ll make yourself crazy over all the shots you could have taken.

365

This will be my last Instant 365 post for some time. I'm headed out on vacation tomorrow and won't be back till the last week in July. I'll be taking my polaroids as I go along, but it will take some time to get back to updating here and my flickr pages.

Since I'm primarily a film shooter, I won't have much to share till I've gotten back and developed/scanned the many rolls of film I hope to shoot. I am taking a point and shoot digital and my iPad. I plan to update my Posterous page now and again as well as sending the occasional image to twitter. So, please follow me in those places and I'll try to have something interesting to show for your time.

062910 - Arizona Furniture on Expired 690

 

063010 - Prayers on a Cross

 

070110 - Classic Chevy

 

070210 - Pastel Sky